Object Lesson: humanity and air. Collin Tate

The human race has been infatuated by air since the dawn of civilization. Yet we have damaged the air beyond recognition. The air provides us with more than we could possibly imagine. Beyond the breath that fills your lungs air fills your life. Many people make the mistake of equating oxygen to air, but at seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen, and one percent of various other gases, the air around you is a cocktail of elements. Added to that, an unthinkable number of hitchhikers float on every breeze. From spores of fungi to the discharge of coal power plants, everything ends up in the air. Do you really know what it is you’re breathing in? Sure, you could filter some of it out, vast portions of our population are forced to wear a mask every day. But still they cannot escape the inevitable traces of human pollution that hang all around us. So why do we continue to destroy and tarnish the thing that sustains us?

            Not only is the air around us necessary for fueling our lives, but it protects us in many other ways we don’t even see. Asteroids from space are burn up well before they hit the ground. The extinction event that decimated the dinosaurs would happen regularly. climate is possible and survivable because of our rather unique atmosphere without it, we would just be another red rock like Mars. Without air, the sun’s warmth would leak out into the void of space freezing us before we could so much as blink. It is the most important defining factor for life on Earth. Yet within the extremely short time humanity has been on the Earth, we have managed to do unfathomable damage to it. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Humanity, or Homo Sapiens are about 300,000 years old. yet we have wrought untold damage on the air around us. Every time we start our car, turn on a light, or buy a product, somewhere down the line the air is suffering for that decision. No matter if the pollution is being belched out of an exhaust pipe, or pumped into the sky from a factory, or leached from a streetlight, the result is the same. The tradeoff is that life is more convenient, so it’s worth it right?

            First, we must think about what air is really worth. Is it only worth thinking about because it fills our lungs? The air around us fills far more than that. It fills our lives in so many ways. It fills our senses in the most basic of terms. Take a deep breath on a stormy morning while the clouds roll in and lighting strikes in the distance, let the sharp taste of lightning charged air fill your lungs. Exhale on a frostbitten afternoon when snow blankets the ground and falls gently around you, watch as your breath of air floats away like a small puffy cloud. Stand on the beach on a windy evening as the waves of the ocean roll in and pound against the rocks, feel the breeze ruffle your hair, breath in the saltiness of the air around you. Sit in a crowded concert hall while music rumbles through the air from the performers on the stage and the sound fills the night with vibrations. All of these wonderful sensations are brought to you by something so invisible that you don’t even notice it all around you. Air provides not only the ability for life but also the ability to live life well. From flying a kite in the park, to watching orange and yellow leaves float down from a tree in an autumn breeze, air gives so much joy to the life we live.

We now know the chemical signature of air, but for eons of human history we knew it as an element in its own right. Humans deemed air so important as to count it among the four most primal forces that shape our world: air, earth, fire, and water. How could they not, when wind tore down the trees of the forest, wore down the rocks of the mesa, shifted the sand of the desert beneath their feet, and brought in massive storms to pound against the shore or gentle rain to feed the life around them? It was no accident that the ancient Greeks and Romans believed the god of air to be king of all the other gods and reign from atop a mountain peak in the sky. Even Judeo-Christians look to the sky for the home of God and imagine cherubs sitting atop clouds floating on a breeze. No spire of nature or structure of man is safe from the eroding touch of air. The same can be said for the vital copper and iron humans have used to climb out of the depths of antiquity both tools and weapons. All succumb eventually to the air around them. But, even with all the destructive power that a hurricane or tornado brings to bear against man, we have worshiped the air and wind for as long as we have had civilizations to build bulwarks against them. From Jupiter and Zeus who drew their lot in a game of chance and the four gods of the wind in the Mediterranean to the Jade Emperor, Yu Huang Dadi in China, from the many wind spirits of the Native American’s that number more than the tribes themselves to Anshar god of the sky of the ancient Sumerians, the world has looked to the many incarnations of the creator and protector of the universe as the gods of the sky and air.

Look to any wonder of the world and you will see the mark of air in one of two forms. You will see it either in the damage and how it is trying to be prevented, or how it is honored and revered. Maybe both. Even in today’s modern world, we strive to build taller and taller towers to reach as high as we can into the air. But, the taller the tower the more we must account for the havoc wrought upon it by the very thing it strives towards. We must add layers upon layers of protection so that we can attain our goal without the wind toppling out achievement. Our buildings must sway with the whims of the wind to keep from falling. Our monuments can be dated by the touch of the wind upon them in all its myriad forms. Some are even made more beautiful by it. Consider the Statue of Liberty and its distinctive green hue. That green color is oxidation of the copper Lady Liberty is made of and it is not her original state. Yet, that is one of her most defining features. Though it is well within our means to polish her to a coppery sheen, her defiance of time and air are vital to her charm. The air has made her more beautiful than human hands could have ever realized.

Despite the brutality and the beauty that the air holds, many still look at the air as nothing more than a tool or a resource. And, as always, the air provides. From even some of our most ancient roots, humans have harnessed the power of the air and its movements to make life easier. The story of using the wind truly starts with sailing. Even now in our entertainment, we constantly go back to the image of sails billowing in the wind. It brings a sense of power and freedom that is hard to rival. Still, it is one of the most basic uses of the air that mankind has discovered, using wind to push something we need to move. Sailing allowed great innovation, knowledge of our world, and connections among people along with the evils of war, conquest, and colonialism. But, as always, the air cannot be blamed for the uses made of it anymore than the rock can be blamed for striking Able’s head. Still, the air took its revenge where it could. The men who used the winds to travel across the sea quickly learned to fear its wrath. Just as quickly as a ship could glide across the waters, the wind could abandon a ship and leave it stranded in the water, floundering until the men starved. The air was kinder to other uses for its power. Just as the wind moved ships, it could move a great many other things. Including turbines. In days passed, man developed great spindles to catch the air in its journeys across the earth and used that power to spin wheels and grind grain. With this innovation, man could reach agricultural heights it had only dreamed of. For this use, the wind seldom had need to take vengeance. A windless day simply meant a day pushing wheels instead of starvation. We still use similar technology today. Though ships of the modern world no longer rely on the mercy of the air, turbines still spin under the force of the wind. We no longer use these turbines to crush grains, but rather to produce electricity.  In the United States, 1.9% of electricity consumed is produced by wind turbines. This is an incredibly small number compared to the amount we use. Compare that to the combined 81.3% of consumption in the United States produced by Petroleum, Coal, and Gas and it is even more shocking. Especially considering the heinous amounts of pollution the larger sources are infamous for. The reason for this disparity? Mostly that the larger producers are more profitable, occupy less room, and they are already built. Harnessing the air for producing electricity is a relativly new innovation. Many countries, like the United States, are still in the process of developing and implementing this technology. Current models of wind turbines can produce three megawatts each, however, for comparison, “the land area covered by a wind power station of the same energy output as a nuclear power station would be about 2,000 times as great.” Which means that we are still rather limited in the implementation of wind turbines as a power source.

Even with emergent technology harnessing the wind as a power source, production of electricity is still one of the biggest threats to the health of our air. An estimate from the United Nations puts a deadline of eleven years to drastically change our pollution rates before the damage becomes totally irreversible. Make no mistake, even with that timeline, we have pumped enough poisons into our atmosphere that we will still see significant damage and already are seeing the effects. From rising temperatures due to increased amounts of carbon-dioxide in our air, to sickness from toxic aerosols floating along, we have already dug our grave. How deep should we make it? What can we do to change the outcome? The answer is almost nothing. Before you go out and put a down payment on that fancy new electric car, or decide to sit in the dark all day you need to know one key fact. According to the EPA, only twelve percent of greenhouse gas emissions, one of the biggest offenders of air pollution, come from commercial and residential sources as of 2018. Meanwhile, twenty-eight percent comes from transportation or shipping, twenty-seven percent comes from electric production, and twenty-two percent comes from industrial sources. This means that, while we are definitely guilty of damaging the air that has served us and awed us for thousands of years, we as individuals are nowhere near as damaging as certain corporations. The Carbon Majors Report produced by the Carbon Disclosure Project or CDP found that roughly seventy percent of global emissions since 1988 can be traced to 100 companies. So, while individual action can certainly help for small scale problems, we as people cannot hope to touch the damage being done to our air. So, should we just go ahead and have a funeral for our air then? Not necessarily. As Journalist Naomi Klein said, “Climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.” From the moment we as a race began to harness the power of the air, we also began down the path to its destruction.

Unfortunately, the pollution of our air doesn’t end there. Air is totally invisible right? Well, to the naked eye, yes. But, in actuality, no. just like every other bit of matter, the gases that make up our air will reflect some light. Imagine driving late at night. You’ve been in rural areas for a while, when suddenly you turn a corner and you can see a glow in the distance, and you know that you are approaching a city. This is a good example of light pollution. But, how does this relate to air? Well, as far as its composition, it doesn’t. However, one of the fundamental features of air is that it is transparent. Light pollution, although on a relativly small scale in terms of transparency, reduces our ability to see through it. In scientific terms, the reason we can see through air is that it does not reflect enough light for our eyes to register and therefore does not process in our brains as an object. However, in areas where there is an overabundance of light, enough light is being reflected from the molecules that make up our air that we see a glow. The effect is that visibility is lowered. For humans this is a fairly minor nuisance, but for other animals, this can be detrimental. For instance, “Sea turtles lay their eggs on beaches, and when they hatch, the hatchlings move away from the dark silhouettes of the sand dunes toward the brighter horizon of the ocean. However, many coastal areas are becoming heavily populated and these artificial lights draw the baby sea turtles away from the safety of the ocean.” Sea turtles are just one example of animals that have evolved to use light as a critical indicator for behavior. While this is a minor nuance compared to other forms of pollution for humans, it does also impair our ability to see and study space. Light pollution can affect scientists’ ability to use equipment like telescopes since visibility is lowered, and in such sensitive equipment that is detrimental. So, while it may not change the composition of air, light pollution changes a fundamental aspect of air and only gets worse when compounded with other forms of air pollution.

Humans have been connected to the air since the dawn of civilization. We have worshiped the air, we have harnessed the air, and we have nearly destroyed the air. Perhaps it is time we remember what the air gives us. It makes our lives possible and makes our lives worth living. Perhaps it is also time we remember how we have achieved the advancement we have. Without the air, we would have never been able to connect to our neighbors across oceans and would all be isolated without the trade necessary for innovations. But still, we have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice something that has been so dear to us that we once worshiped it. and we sacrifice it only for an easier life. The pollution we have now is the direct result of a direct result of nothing more than negligence and willfully turning a blind eye to the damage being wrought for the sake of a better life. However, it is not too late to change course. So, take a deep breath of the less than fresh air that has been left to us. Take a deep breath and demand change.

 

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